Marvin Minsky Comment on Schooling

In the July 1994 _Communications of the ACM_ there is an interview
with Marvin Minsky (former director of the MIT AI lab, widely
considered to be one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, and
an occasional collaborator of Seymour Papert's).

Among other things he says (on page 26):

(Interviewer): ...For an older student in a conservatory, we
can imagine having to study Gregorian chants for a few
months before getting any highly (positive) feedback.
But in the case of a five-year-old child learning piano
or composing, we cannot depend only on delayed feedback
or abstract feedback.

Minsky: I'm afraid that's true, at least for most young
children, but the evidence is that many of our foremost
achievers developed under conditions that are not much
like those of present-day mass education. Robert Lawler
just showed me a paper by Harold Macurdy on the child
pattern of genius. Macurdy reviews the early education
of many eminent people from the last couple of centuries
and concludes (1) that most of them had an enormous
amount of attention paid to them by one or both parents
and (2) that generally they were relatively isolated from
other children. This is very different from what most
people today consider an ideal school. It seems to me
that much of what we call education is really
socialization. Consider what we do to our kids. Is it
really a good idea to send your 6-year-old into a room
full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your
7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple
recursive argument suggests this exposes them to a real
danger of all growing up with the minds of 6-year-olds.
And, so far as I can see, that's exactly what happens.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange
idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought.
Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better
explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than
it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.